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questions. I wasn’t the only one to be interviewed. When we were eleven and twelve, we did them<br />
together, but as we turned thirteen or fourteen my friends’ brothers and fathers didn’t allow them<br />
because they had entered puberty and should observe purdah and also they were afraid.<br />
One day I went on Geo, which is one of the biggest news channels in our country. There was a wall<br />
of screens in their office. I was astonished to see so many channels. Afterwards I thought, The media<br />
needs interviews. They want to interview a small girl, but the girls are scared, and even if they’re not,<br />
their parents won’t allow it. I have a father who isn’t scared, who stands <strong>by</strong> me. He said, ‘You are a<br />
child and it’s your right to speak.’ The more interviews I gave, the stronger I felt and the more support<br />
we received. I was only eleven but I looked older, and the media seemed to like hearing from a young<br />
girl. One journalist called me takra jenai – a ‘bright shining young lady’ and another said you are<br />
‘pakha jenai’ – you are wise beyond your years. In my heart was the belief that God would protect<br />
me. If I <strong>am</strong> speaking for my rights, for the rights of girls, I <strong>am</strong> not doing anything wrong. It’s my duty<br />
to do so. God wants to see how we behave in such situations. There is a saying in the Quran, ‘The<br />
falsehood has to go and the truth will prevail.’ If one man, Fazlullah, can destroy everything, why<br />
can’t one girl change it? I wondered. I prayed to God every night to give me strength.<br />
The media in Swat were under pressure to give positive coverage to the Taliban – some even<br />
respectfully called the Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan ‘School dada’, when in reality he was<br />
destroying schools. But many local journalists were unhappy about what was happening to their valley<br />
and they gave us a powerful platform as we would say things they didn’t dare to.<br />
We didn’t have a car so we went <strong>by</strong> rickshaw, or one of my father’s friends would take us to the<br />
interviews. One day my father and I went to Peshawar to appear on a BBC Urdu talk show hosted <strong>by</strong><br />
a f<strong>am</strong>ous columnist called Wasatullah Khan. We went with my father’s friend Fazal Maula and his<br />
daughter. Two fathers and two daughters. To represent the Taliban they had Muslim Khan, who<br />
wasn’t in the studio. I was a bit nervous but I knew it was important as many people all over Pakistan<br />
would be listening. ‘How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?’ I said. There was<br />
no response from Muslim Khan because his phone interview had been pre-recorded. How can a<br />
recording respond to live questions?<br />
Afterwards people congratulated me. My father laughed and said I should go into politics. ‘Even<br />
as a toddler you talked like a politician,’ he teased. But I never listened to my interviews. I knew these<br />
were very small steps.<br />
Our words were like the eucalyptus blossoms of spring tossed away on the wind. The destruction<br />
of schools continued. On the night of 7 October 2008 we heard a series of faraway blasts. The next<br />
morning we learned that masked militants had entered the Sangota Convent School for girls and the<br />
Excelsior College for boys and blown them up using improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The<br />
teachers had already been evacuated as they had received threats earlier. These were f<strong>am</strong>ous schools,<br />
particularly Sangota, which dated from the time of the last wali and was well known for academic<br />
excellence. They were also big – Excelsior had over 2,000 pupils and Sangota had 1,000. My father<br />
went there after the bombings and found the buildings completely razed to the ground. He gave<br />
interviews to TV reporters <strong>am</strong>id broken bricks and burned <strong>book</strong>s and returned home horrified. ‘It’s<br />
all just rubble,’ he said.<br />
Yet my father remained hopeful and believed there would be a day when there was an end to the<br />
destruction. What really depressed him was the looting of the destroyed schools – the furniture, the